Campaign funds hard to track

If you want to see which corporate CEOs gave money to your city council or how many teachers contributed to school board members' campaigns, bring some caffeine, eye drops and a pen.

County election commissions across Tennessee accept campaign finance reports only on paper, not electronically, making it difficult to look for patterns and track trends at the intersections of money, power and influence.

The Knox County Election Commission has made recent financial disclosures available in .pdf format on the commission's website. Other counties lag behind.

In a state that only recently stopped requiring citizens to show identification before reviewing such records, the practice can seem like another roadblock to keeping tabs on politicians and their financial backers.

"The idea that you have to go down there and look at a hard copy of something that could quite easily be exported into a (computer) file is ridiculous," said political blogger Sean Braisted, who was frustrated during Nashville's 2007 mayoral race, when five major candidates collectively raised some $5 million.

"It's important to be able to track down who's giving and receiving this money so we can hold candidates accountable."

The reports can be tough for the average citizen to process without thumbing through hundreds of pages of documents - after paying for copies, unless you want to sit in a government office building for hours - and making lots of notes.

The Tennessean typed each of Mayor Karl Dean's 2,267 campaign donations into a searchable database before it could analyze them for a recent story that noted how much money Dean received from development interests.

"It's hard to believe in this day and age," said Massie Ritsch, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, D.C.-based research group that tracks federal campaign finance trends.

"It's rare that a viable campaign would keep records on paper. The information is already stored electronically, so it shouldn't be difficult to provide electronically."

But Tennessee's county election offices aren't set up for that, said Drew Rawlins, executive director of the state's Registry of Election Finance. They don't have the technology, and many lack the manpower.

"I don't think any county is doing it," Rawlins said. "Our office would be glad to work with them."

State races are different The state has required all candidates for state offices with more than $1,000 in donations to file reports electronically since 2004. But putting the Web-based system in place wasn't cheap. Rawlins said a "rewrite" of the system earlier this year cost nearly $250,000, "and that's not even really starting from ground zero."

Ritsch said some federal elections aren't much easier for finance-watchers than the local races. Candidates for the U.S. Senate file their campaign finance reports on paper. The Federal Election Commission then pays a data-entry firm to type every donation into a searchable database, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ritsch said.

Attempts to change the law haven't succeeded.

"There's no reason for it other than to hide information from the public," Ritsch said.

Ray Barrett, Davidson County's election administrator, said he'd like to be able to provide candidates' financial data electronically.

"It would tickle me pink to do it," Barrett said last week. "We wouldn't have all these files full of paper back here."

Contact Michael Cass at 615-259-8838 or mcass@tennessean.com.